Friday, August 30, 2013

We are being offered yet another version of the
Dhammapada, this time not a new translation or eventhe more common rehash by someone who knows
no Pali of someone else’s rehash who knew no Pali either, but an “interpretation”.
According to the blurb on Tai Sheridan’s The Bare
Bones Dhammapada, the original text is “burdened by the stylistic and
conceptual dust of the early and middle ages” and this new version “strips the
Dhammapada of monasticism, literalness, chauvinism, anachronisms, and concepts
of evil, shame, and sensual denial. It presents the path of wisdom as
universal truths for a contemporary audience of any gender, lifestyle, or
spiritual inclination”. No it doesn’t!All it does is offer cryptic verses, some of which are actually quite
poetic, but that in no way reflect either the Buddha’s words or intent.

For example the Buddha of both the Pali Theravada
and the Sanskrit Mahayana sutras was disparaging of dancing while Tai Sheridan
apparently enjoys it and therefore Dhammapada verse 16 can be rendered as “do
good dance joyfully”. Tai loves partyingand is convinced the Buddha did too, hence verse 18 can be rendered as
“do good throw a party on the path sing and dance.” All this renders the
Dhammapada unfamiliar to anyone who knows it. What is very familiar about The Bare Bones Dhammapada is the assumption
underlying it: “I happen to believe in and like (fill in
the gap) and that’s what the Buddha taught.”

Hemmingway’s comment on punctuation
could apply equally well to translating or even paraphrasing other peoples work,
especially classics such as the Dhammapada. “My attitude toward
punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of
golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on
the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal
better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to
bring in your own improvements.”

Sunday, August 25, 2013

A young Vietnamese woman’s husband fell ill.
Desperate for a cure, she later recounted, she visited the local Buddhist
temple. A monk there instructed her to “release 40 birds, one for every year of
your husband’s life.” So she did, purchasing and releasing 40 birds at the
temple grounds. The woman soon rejoiced; her husband made a full recovery. This
is a common story in Asia, where “merit
release ”
of captive wild animals are performed
in Buddhist rituals. But the practice raises concern amongst the conservation
community for its potential to impact threatened species. Before a bird can be
freed, it has to be captured—often just after having been released by someone
else. The result is the denuding of wild populations and a vast recycling of
mistreated animals, most of which are likely die on one of their ersatz flights
to freedom. As if that were not bad enough, the dead, disease-ridden animals
are then sold in food markets. “We were staggered by the number of birds moving
through this trade,” says Martin Gilbert, a veterinarian at the Wildlife
Conservation Society who recently co-authored a study in
Biological Conservation on merit releases. “It’s a very good rational
and understandable thing to do, to let captive animals go free,” he says. “But
in certain situations, it creates a trade purely for demand for animals in
cages.” Gilbert and his colleagues monitored daily sales of merit release birds
in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, over a period of 13
months. From their findings, they estimated nearly 700,000 animals pass through
the local trade annually. They recorded a total of 57 bird species in the
cages, including globally near-threatened Asian golden weavers and vulnerable
yellow-breasted buntings. “This paper highlights the potentially huge
impact merit releases have on a few birds that are easily caught and are
already of conservation concern,” says John Pilgrim, a conservation consultant
who specializes in Southeast Asia and Melanesia
and who was not involved in the study. Gilbert says he knows of only one other
study, conducted in Hong Kong, which attempted
to estimate merit release figures. The numbers were comparable, reporting that
Hong Kong Buddhist temples released up to 580,000 birds per year. “It’s pretty
scary that this [new] paper estimates just a dozen families in two small
markets sold more than 630,000 birds per year,” Pilgrim says. Conservationists
do not know how the merit release market figures into Asia’s
overall wildlife trade, which also exploits wild birds for pets, food,
passerine fights and song contests. Globally, trade in wild birds impacts about
400 species that are listed on the International Union for Conservation of
Nature’s Red List, or one third of
all threatened bird species. No one know how many birds succumb each year to
the wildlife trade since much of the trafficking is illegal, but within
Southeast Asia alone, it is likely “in the order of tens of millions,” says
Kelly Edmunds, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in England who
investigates the emerging infectious diseases amongst bird sellers in Asia and
was not involved in the study. Buddhists free captive animals in order to
accumulate health and longevity merits for themselves and loved ones. The exact
origins of the practice are unclear, though it was mentioned in fifth-century
Chinese Buddhist texts that instructed
followers to “practice the act of releasing animals due to the mind of
compassion.”

About Me

I am not the 5th or 9th reincarnation of a great lama, I have not recived any empowerments or initiations, I am not the holder of any lineage, I am yet to attain any of the jhanas, I am not a widely respected teacher, I am not a stream enterer (at least I don't feel like one)and I do not have many disciples. Nontheless, you may find some of my observations and musings interesting. I have been a Buddhist monk for 32 years and am the spiritual advisor to the Buddha Dhamma Mandala Society in Singapore.